Jimmy Kay from Canada’s The Metal Voice interviewed critically acclaimed Rock author Martin Popoff about his new YES book “Time and a Word” Popoff talks ‘Yes’ history, the Breakups, Reunions, the albums and side projects.

Popoff told the Metal Voice, “The roots of progressive metal itself are definitely Rush. Rush I think is the first progressive metal band. Yes is probably the band that is the precursor, the proto progressive metal band. A little bit of Yes, a little bit of King Crimson, little bit of Genesis. A lot of metal people like Yes and they like prog in general.”

Popoff went on to say, “In 1972 Yes came out with Close To The Edge. I was thinking at one point I might do a book of the top 500 progressive rock albums of all time. And I started taking a poll. As I was taking that poll, it basically turned out that Close to the edge would win that poll. Basically Yes Close To The Edge is the greatest progressive rock album of all time.”

Popoff also spoke about one of the most famous projects that never went got going, the supergroup XYZ which included members of Yes and Led Zeppelin, after John Bonham’s death. Popoff said, “Basically in this book I cover off quite a bit of detail all the side bands of YES, including ASIA and all the solo projects of everybody. But one that didn’t get off the ground is this XYZ situation. They (Chris Squire, Alan White, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page), did do a little bit of jamming trying to get things off the ground. But it just didn’t really go anywhere, Robert’s heart and head really wasn’t really into it. Jimmy was a little more game into trying to do something with it. You can hear some of these sessions online. I believe a bunch of this is on Youtube. A little bit of those songs (don’t quote me) which show up on later projects possible the firm and later Yes albums.”